Monday, September 24, 2012 ratings – The 2012-13 season is finally here in full force. Last night, we had the series premiere of Partners on CBS, as well as the returns of How I Met Your Mother, 2 Broke Girls, Mike & Molly, and Hawaii Five-0. On ABC, it was the return of Dancing with the Stars with an all-star edition and Castle. NBC offered The Voice and week two of Revolution while on FOX it was the second weeks of Bones and The Mob Doctor. The CW is still in summer mode and said goodbye to The LA Complex (at least for now).

On NBC, The Voice once again won the night in the targeted demo but was in second place in total viewers. It registered a 4.3 in the 18-49 demographic with 11.93 million viewers. That was down by 9% week-to-week in the demo.

That was followed by Revolution at 10pm with a 3.5 demo rating and 9.29 million. That represents a 16% decline from the premiere which is not unusual. Will it keep falling? We shall see.

On CBS, it was the return of How I Met Your Mother at 8pm. It drew a 3.4 demo rating with 8.66 million. That was very healthy but the venerable sitcom was down by 28% when compared to last season’s opener.

The series premiere of Partners followed at 8:30pm with a 2.4 rating and 6.50 million viewers. That’s a decent number on its own but, when compared to the rest of CBS’ sitcoms, it’s not good enough. Compared to a year ago, the network was down by 34% in the timeslot.

At 9pm, 2 Broke Girls returned for a new season with a 3.7 demo rating and 10.02 million viewers. It was down by 48% in the demo compared to last year’s but it’s lead in had been the first Ashton Kutcher episode of Two and a Half Men.

That was followed by the third season debut of Mike & Molly with a 3.0 in the demo and 9.31 million. The sitcom was down by 38% year-to-year.

Hawaii Five-0 finished the night for CBS with a 1.9 demo rating and 7.97 million. Those are the show’s worst ratings in the show’s history. What happened?

On ABC, we had the return of Dancing with the Stars which won the night in total viewers. It drew a 2.7 demo rating and 14.58 million viewers. Year-to-year, it was down by 33% in the demo.

That was followed by the return of Castle with a 2.5 demo rating and 11.38 million viewers. Year-to-year, it was down by 22% in the demo.

And finally, on The CW, it was the final season two episodes of The LA Complex. Opposite even tougher competition than usual, they drew a 0.3 rating and 0.65 million viewers at 8pm and a 0.2 rating and 0.38 million at 9pm. That was about on par with the rest of the season.

What do you think? Are you concerned with any of the season-to-season declines? What caused so many? What did you watch last night?

And here I was worried that Hawaii Five-0 and Castle would cream Revolution. I taped all three shows and watched Revolution live, but I thought going up against two vernerable hits would do it in (and perhaps it will, in the long term, but clearly not yet). I remember thinking the same thing about Grimm up against Fringe and Supernatural, but you can see what happened there: Grimm did fantastic by NBC and Friday standards, Fringe lost out, Supernatural did fine (because standards for Friday night on the CW are so low to begin with and CW didn’t have many other “certified hits” to bring back again).

It was stupid enough to put Hawaii Five-0 and Castle in the same time slot (as they’ve historically cannibalized each other in the ratings to be about even), but my guess is that it’s even more stupid to put a THIRD interesting program (read: non-reality TV show) in that slot. That’s the only reason I can think of for Hawaii’s and Castle’s ratings being so low… Hawaii dropped even lower than Castle and they had a cliffhanger ending that would normally demand being watched live — but they had to deal with “event television” new genre show Revolution, which — if only by virtue of it being new — also demanded to be watched live.

What happened to Hawai’i 50 is that the idiots were watching stupid reality TV. Why can’t all reality shows be on one channel so the cable stations can get back to doing what they were doing before Survivor & DWT Idiots.